A couple of years back I saw a documentary on fractals ("Fractals: The Colors of Infinity", narrated by Arthur C. Clarke, with music by Dave Gilmour of Pink Flo

A couple of years back I saw a documentary on fractals ("Fractals: The Colors of Infinity", narrated by Arthur C. Clarke, with music by Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd - that was one groovy documentary!) where they showed this mathematician who apparently had a research grant from some military-intelligence-ish government agency to develop fractal image compression for their spy satellites. I wondered why I never that technology in action, and I figured it had something to do with the amount of secrecy surrounding spy satellites. It is kind of sad that the reason is so much more mundane.